Adult Education Perspectives

From Adult Education

Daniel D. Pratt and associates have identified five perspectives on teaching in adult and higher education. The following chapters will elaborate on each perspective.

• The Transmission Perspective
• The Apprenticeship Perspective
• The Developmental Perspective
• The Nurturing Perspective
• The Social Reform Perspective

Each perspective is outlined by Pratt & Collins (2000) which are briefly described below:

• Transmission perspective: Effective teaching requires a substantial commitment to the content or subject matter.
• Apprenticeship perspective: Effective teaching is a process of socializing students into new behavioral norms and professional ways of working.
• Developmental perspective: Effective teaching must be planned and conducted “from the learner's point of view”.
• Nurturing perspective: Effective teaching assumes that long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from the heart as much as it does from the head.
• Social reform perspective: Effective teaching seeks to change social structures in substantive ways.

References:

Pratt, D. D. and Associates. (1998). Five perspectives on teaching in adult and higher education. Malabar, FL: Krieger Publishing Company. ISBN: 0-89464-937-X.

Pratt, D. D., & Collins, J. B., (2000). The teaching perspectives inventory: Developing and testing an instrument to assess teaching perspectives. In: Proceedings of the 41st Adult Education Research Conference, Vancouver, BC, June (pp. 346–350).